The
Department of Computing Science and Mathematics presents the
following seminars. Unless otherwise stated, seminars will
take place in Room 4B94 of the Cottrell Building, University
of Stirling from 15.00 to 16.00 on Friday afternoons during
semester time. For instructions on how to get to the
University, please look at the following routes.

If you
would like to give a seminar to the department in future or if
you need more information, please contact the seminar organiser,
Marwan Fayed, by

The independent verification of results is a
critical step in the scientific process, and it would seem that
achieving reproducibility should be much easier for
computational scientists than for experimentalists. However,
problems with reproducibility have received wide attention in
recent years in many fields of computational inquiry, and some
refer to the inability to routinely achieve reproducibility as a
true crisis in computational science. Reproducibility in
computational neuroscience requires descriptions of complex
models that are precise and unambiguous. In this talk, I will
discuss some recent neuroinformatics approaches aimed toward
achieving reproducibility including model sharing databases,
suggestions for publication standards, software for tracking
computational "experiments", and simulator independent model
description languages. In addition, I will provide an overview
of the current status of efforts in our community and their
trajectories.

The talk will demonstrate how a constructive version of the
description logic ALC (Attribute Logic with Complement) can serve as a
semantic type system for an extension of the simply typed
lambda-calculus to express computations in knowledge bases. This
cALculus embodies a functional core language which provides static
type checking of semantic information processing of data whose
structure is organised under a relational data model as used in
description logics. The cALculus arises from a natural interpretation
of the tableau rules for constructive ALC following the
Curry-Howard-Isomorphism. We will argue that this modal type theory,
due to its strong constructive interpretation, can deal with
incomplete and dynamically changing data. This includes knowledge
states of mobile agents which would be inconsistent in classical or
even intuitionistic modal logics.

Autonomic systems are ones that exhibit the properties of self-organization, self-healing, self-optimization and self-protection. This talk explores some of the issues surrounding autonomic computing; namely the automatic distribution of an application across available resources. The goal is to provide the benefits of autonomic computing while at the same time relieving the applications programmer from the need to interact with complex middleware interfaces and deal with the mechanics of manual distribution.

This talk will examine 1) AdJava, an extension to Java to provide support to convert a multi-threaded application into a distributable one and inject autonomic properties, and 2) an agent-based approach to convert legacy Java systems (byte code) into distributed autonomic systems.

The Evolution of Layered Protocol Stacks in
the Internet (re-presentation).

Marwan Fayed

University of Stirling

The Internet protocol stack has a layered
architecture that resembles an hourglass. The lower and higher
layers tend to see frequent innovations, while the protocols at
the waist of the hourglass appear to be 'ossified'. The authors
of this work have proposed a model by which this might occur,
suggesting even that this ossification may be inevitable. This
work is particularly interesting for the questions it tries to
answer, as well as the strong feelings it evoked.

No-one seriously doubts that the brain is the site of the mind. But what
is the nature of this sited-ness? What are the candidates? Von der
Malsburg has a much-cited paper entitled "Am I thinking Assemblies" in
1988: but what does that imply? We are tempted to assume that what we
can measure is what matters (whether that be local field potentials,
spikes, fMRI measurements, or others. Indeed, much has been made of
mind-reading machines based on fMRI in some parts of the press. But what
are the alternatives, and why and how might we pursue this issue?